Survey of Developments in Australian Private International Law 2013

This review of the Australian developments in private international law covers developments in 2013. It again adopts the qualitative approach and traditional conflicts structure of previous annual reviews. The developments of broader interest occur in a small number of cases decided in the past year, the entry into force of the Trans-Tasman Proceedings Regime on 11 October 2013, and further progress on the Hague Judgments Project since its relaunch in 2011 including a further meeting of the expert and working groups in February 2013 to address recognition and enforcement mechanisms as well as jurisdictional issues, such as parallel proceedings. The Standing Council on Law and Justice’s project to reform Australia’s private international law also continues. We begin with this year in review from an international perspective. Australia is an active participant in international efforts to harmonise international private and commercial law. The Judgments Project of the Hague Conference on Private International Law, the Choice of Court Convention, and the Draft Hague Principles on Choice of Law in International Commercial Principles all merit our comments in this chapter. We then summarise and comment upon some of the cases that have attracted our attention. A large number of cases applied established principles, or turned on particular facts, and are therefore not discussed in this chapter. Of the cases we have chosen to discuss, the matters and amounts in dispute range from NZ$161,876 for two spray tanning booths, to more than $20 million in a contractual dispute over a copper mine in Botswana